A hypnotic trance isn’t a delicate statue

I’ve been chatting with new hypnotists a lot recently. There have been a trickle of people interested in the field that turned into a small flood. I’ve had the honour to work briefly with a few of them.

And be hypnotised by some of them.

It’s great hearing about the paths that lead people to learning this.

It’s also wonderful watching them develop from unsure and clumsy into smooth operators.

There’s one thing people often learn quickly. I didn’t always know this, but I don’t remember learning it. Maybe someone told me, or maybe it emerged from practice – who knows.

A hypnotic trance is not a delicate statue.

It’s a deep swimming pool.

Here’s what I mean by that:

The first few inductions are a little nerve-wracking – at least, they were for me. Taking the wheel with a process like this is… strange. And just like driving, what was once bizarre and difficult is now natural.

You’re worried about making a mistake. It seems like trance is such a delicate thing – one wrong move and it breaks.

But your hypnotic state isn’t so fragile. It can endure a lot, under the right conditions.

Also, it’s not a binary state. It’s not broken or whole. It’s much more like a swimming pool, where you can be dangling your feet in the water or completely submerged.

Mistakes don’t “break” a trance – they just move you to a shallower part of the pool.

Assuming they aren’t the sort of mistakes that send you deeper, that is…

Because, like swimming, it’s not fun to stand around in waist-deep water. Once you’re wet, you have the urge to dive.

The only things that would drive someone out of the pool are a bad attitude, physical danger or something like that.

Anything else – including so-called mistakes – just moves you around the pool.

It applies with self-hypnosis, too. You make a mistake or your dog licks your face, and it seems as though the trance is broken.

It’s not.

You’re still in the pool.

So dive already.

And if you keep that attitude and a positive outlook, learning self-hypnosis is easy.